LevelUp Studio

Beautiful Widget 4.0 with Multi-Forecast and Web Skin Market

Jorodan — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:25:54 +0000

We are proud to release a new version of Beautiful Widgets.

While you can find a lot of clock and weather applications for Android, you are often limited by the customizations possibilities. Beautiful Widgets provides the best and biggest skins database, but as we thought it was not enough to satisfy your needs, we are releasing ou Web Skins Market: : http://market.beautiful-widgets.com .

You will be able to browse the skins :

You can select a skin to see the dedicated page. You can :

- view a HD preview

- rate the skin

- change to another skin from the same set (changes on color)

- share on your favorite social networks

Now it is time for you to install Beautiful Widgets and watch the new features:

You can synchronize your device with the Beautiful Widgets Web Market. On the latest, log in with the same Google account that you are using on your device. Now you are able to push every skin to your device by the cloud.

You do not want to be synchronized with our servers ? No problem, just display the QR code for the skin, scan it on your device, and the download will start automatically.

Not enough for you ?

Have a look on our powerful new machine: the Skin Mixer. Mix existing skins into a unique one. Obviously, you will also be able to send it to your phone by the cloud.

That was for the skins, but what about standard functions of a clock and weather application ?

We added a feature demanded from ou since? a long time : multi-forecast. Now you can add multiple locations in Beautiful Widgets and see all the forecast with a unique screen, by sliding between each of them.

Please, find the application on Google Play Store : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.levelup.beautifulwidgets and the press kit here : http://levelupstudio.com/pr/PK_2012_BW_V4.zip .

New awesome features will arrive again in next versions. We love Beautiful Widgets and work on it every days for improving the user experience.

1 million downloads of Beautiful Widgets

Jorodan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:21:39 +0000

Big events happen at the same time.

We celebrated, yesterday, 10 billions downloads with Google on Android Market. For this occasion, Beautiful Widgets was available for only 10ct (on each money) for 24 hours.

Now, we are proud to announce that Beautiful Widgets is the first paid application reaching one million downloads on Android Market.

For this occasion, we offer many information about Beautiful Widgets and LevelUp Studio. Please, read the following infographics.

For your friends, who are not using Beautiful Widgets, you can find always the application on Android Market.

Plume 2.80 Released

Ludovic Vialle — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:40:05 +0000

It has been a while since we updated Plume! We have been very busy working on a few new important features, and ensure that it works with Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. you will be pleased to hear that from now, once Plume is in the foreground, you will get realtime updates in your timeline. We are working hard to getting it to work in the background (in fact we need access to Twitter Site Stream which is in closed beta), this will be added as soon as possible. In the meanwhile, we have also added some features that you have waited for a long time, such as an internal outbox system so you can tweet and do most of the things even with no internet connection, the events will be queued and executed when possible. We thought that was not enough, we added the possibility to add a comment to uploaded pictures, but also support for Tweetmarker to synchronize your timeline position between devices and systems. You can add to the list the fact that we have fixed many bugs and improved performances, with the hope that we did not add too much of them!

Many thanks to all the translators and people that helped to beta test so many versions, we appreciate it!

Read the full changelog.

2.80 – 6th December 2011 – add support for Twitter Streaming for instantaneous updates when Plume is launched.
In the background, Plume is still polling every X minutes for now.
- add an outbox to queue message sending, retweet, favorite, etc even with no connection
- add support for using your tweet as a comment to an uploaded picture on the hosting server
- add TweetMarker support to save/restore your reading position across multiple devices (off by default)
- add support for position restoration on saved search
- add support for position restoration on lists
- add xhdpi support
- revamped a few user interface graphics to be more modern
- fix support for Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich
- fix some missing tweets that contain the same link multiple times
- fix the switch view (for multiple accounts)
- fix the saved search reloading
- many more fixes

LevelUp Studio, Beautiful Widgets and Plume are on Facebook

Jorodan — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:51:43 +0000

If you are using Beautiful Widgets, Plume or Foxyring you may want to tell it to your friends and read information about your favorite application.

Now, you can share you happiness with our apps with all your Facebook friends. It is easy. Click on your favorite app picture and click on “Like”.

With the Facebook pages, you will see the new feature in the apps before updated on your phone. For Beautiful Widget, you can discover new skins for your clock, weather or toggle favorite widgets.

If you love all apps, love our team too. You will be in touch to know when new apps will be released.

Plume is updated, and optimized for tablets

Ludovic Vialle — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:44:52 +0000

After a lot of work and weeks of work engaged in porting Plume to tablet along with Android 3.0, we finally arrived at a state where it was possible to do a first public release after the beta phase. We are proud to announce that Plume is the first fully featured Twitter client for Android that has been ported to Android 3.0 with an interface especially designed for tablets! Also we managed to keep Plume compatible with all devices starting from Android 1.5 up to Android 3.0 and more. Plume 2.5 has been released and is available to all Android users for free! Changes:

2.50 – 10th May 2011

- better use of HoneyComb UI features with an interface optimized for tablets

- replace plixi URLs with lockerz ones

- remove outdated support for Plixi/Lockerz/TweetPhoto listing

- add an option to hide avatars from the timeline to save space

- add a “dark” theme alongside the “light” theme

- Ability to load and save searches

- Default zoom on the internal browser to behave like the android browser

- Internal browser now clear its cache when Plume is exiting

- Internal browser small others improvements

- Tons of other bugfixes and small improvements

Please note that Twitpic upload will be fixed soon, it is a problem with their SSL certificate (we are one of the rare clients to use SSL with them) and they are waiting for a new one.

Beautiful Widgets 3.5: Honeycomb and Moon phases

Ludovic Vialle — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:37:47 +0000

Beautiful Widgets on a Xoom

We a proud to announce that after a whole month of work, we were able to port Beautiful Widgets successfully on Android 3.0 alias Honeycomb! It required a lot of changes in order to support the new API, fortunately Google helped a bit with their library to support what we call “Fragments” even on older Android devices. Fragments are portions of the user interface that can be reused and it now the new standard in developing for Android.

The challenge was mainly to be able to support the new Android tablet while not breaking the user experience on smaller devices, and as we wanted to also please them, we added a few new features so everyone can benefit of the new version! That was the occasion to add a feature requested since a long time: moon phases. Not only we added the current phase, but you can now also know when and what are the next phases.

Moon phases

We also added a lot of small features and optimizations, most of you might not even notice them, but the most important is the ability to change the date format, or to sort the skin list without doing another query on the server. A lot of bug have been squashed.

We sincerely hope that you will love this new release, we keep improving Beautiful Widgets since the first release 20 months ago.

Unfortunately we had to remove Android 1.5 support, which was mandatory in order to move forward…

3.5 – 11th Apr 2011

- Full Support for Tablets with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)
- Added moon phases (current and the next phases) in the forecast window (under Menu)
- Added multiples date format for the Super Clock
- Added a 4×3 Super Clock, mostly designed for Tablets
- It is not required to configure the widget anymore when inserting it
- 24 Hours/12 Hours modes and C°/F° modes are now detected at the first launch
- Fixed the weather network layers freezing the device when updating
- Fixed force close with Live Wallpaper and sunrise/sunset calculation
- Live wallpaper sensor orientation fixed for Honeycomb devices
- Sorting skins is now done locally instead of doing it from the server, which result in faster operations and less load on the server
- Android 1.5 support had to be removed to support newer Android versions. Android 1.5 users should not install future updates.
- Fixed support for Polish font encoding and Google Weather
- Japan is using Accuweather by default
- Lot of other bugfixes and optimizations
- Reduced this changelog so it does not crash with Cyanogen 7 final when displayed

PS: We are also actively working on Plume!

Beautiful Widgets reach 500,000 downloads

Ludovic Vialle — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:01:14 +0000

We are excited to see Beautiful Widgets finally reached the symbolic number of 500,000 copies from the Android Market! While we are not the first ones to achieve that number (we think Robo Defense from Lupis Labs Software did it just before us), we are still very proud of what we have done.

LevelUp Studio was created in june 2009, right after the first Android device was released in France. All of this started just from a love for Android, by one man, Ludovic Vialle. Now our constants updates and hard work helped us to become one of the leading teams dedicated to Android. The independent studio is now a team of 4 people (and soon 5!) investing their passion on the platform, in order to deliver you the best applications.

Thank you!

Beautiful Widgets 3.3, finally!

Ludovic Vialle — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:35:12 +0000

After more than two months of work, we are excited to announce our latest Beautiful Widgets version! This new release introduce two major additions.

At first a set of SuperClock Widgets which are the direct successors of the popular Home Widgets. This is a widget with multiple sizes (4×2, 4×1, 2×1) but also multiples layouts! The settings have been reworked to be much easier to changes, and every aspect has been improved compared to the previous versions. The SuperClock Widgets are using a new method to offer very high resolutions skins at any size and resolution, new skins will need to be created to support those enhancements. The weather only widgets are benefiting of the look of the SuperClock! We encourage designers to have a look at our new Skin Development Kit that we are going to release in a few hours.

Another addition is a total rewrite of our Beautiful Live Weather live wallpaper, which is now OpenGL accelerated, include physics and interactions! Try to drag the sun, make the clouds explodes, play with the different type of grass, or watch the rain following your phone orientation. This feature is available only for people having a fast OpenGL accelerated device. The previous version with 2D graphics is still available in the market for your convenience.

With the release of Android 2.3, we have updated our assets to support the new notification style, but also we included hi-resolution notifications icons for previous Android version. Everything is looking better than before! Many others improvements have been added, lot of them are internal but you will notice a few one while using the new version.

We are already working on some other big surprises

Here is the complete changelog:

3.3 – 28th January 2011

- NEW: SuperClock widgets! We have designed a new kind of hi-res clock widgets that are more modular and have multiple layouts and is highly resizable without any quality loss. Those new widgets requires a new kind of skins.

- NEW: Live Wallpaper, totally rewritten using OpenGL, new effects, different type of grass, you can display a picture in the background

- NEW: High resolutions notification icons

- NEW: Gingerbread notifications icons

- NEW: Clock only layouts

- NEW: You can display the battery level instead of the weather (with skins)

- Greatly improved the skin managements

- Fix for older version of Android and toggle widgets

- Possible fix for the force close after applying a toggle skin

- Layout fix for standard chinese on the smaller home

- Fix for french canada and google weather not displaying french

- Updated translations (many thanks to the translators!)

- Others bugfixes

Plume 2.15 available for all!

Ludovic Vialle — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:29:34 +0000

Today we released our latest bugfixes for Plume, which will make people happy as it properly fix the position saving! The update is available in the Android Market, AndroidPit and Applibs. Testers does not need to upgrade because it is the same build.

2.15 – 25th January 2011

- fix the Mark As Spam button

- fix the Show Replies results

- fix some position saving/restore issues

- fix the display message when following a user from a profile

- fix a crash when the picture cache backup is corrupted

- better handling of invalid twitter account profile display

Plume 2.10 available

Ludovic Vialle — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:11:33 +0000

As promised, here is the release of Plume, Bonjour Plume! Quelle joie de te rencontrer! Touiteur is now gone and will probably rest in peace, your tweets will say via Plume. You will also quickly notice that we have made a few general improvements on the stability and the speed of the application. As usual, the update is available in the Android Market.

Here is the full changelog:

2.10 – 23rd December 2010

- rename Touiteur to Plume

- add native retweet support in the widgets

- add the possibility to import saved settings from the wizard (after installation)

- add the delete/replies/share/clipboard functions from the profile view

- faster and more reliable picture cache

- general speed improvements (less lag)

- fix occasional loss of connection for 15 minutes

- fix the profile picture preview size

- fix the scrollable widget counter update

- fix do not reorder the follower/following list

- fix show when the tweet is sending in the widget

- fix some translations